Black Mesa (Mod)

A long time back, Black Mesa was released. This is a Source mod that is a recreation of Half-Life. It has been in development since 2004 or so, when Half-Life: Source was released, and everyone discovered that it was pretty much the same thing from 1998. Originally this mod was called "Black Mesa: Source", but Valve kindly asked if they would drop the "Source" part.

A screenshot of Black Mesa, looking out over a desert

The whole thing is a semi-verbatim recreation of Half-Life. Some parts have been eliminated, others shortened, and a few levels have been expanded. Oh, and it looks prettier. Much prettier, in fact. There is nothing here that looks like poop smeared origami. I recall the building with the lasers and the nuke was changed quite a bit, because the minefield getting inside there didn't make me angry. The area where a grenade explosion happens in a tube and you have to back out of it has been eliminated. The "on a rail" level has been shortened quite a bit; which is too bad, because that was one of my favorite levels. I heard about a mod to this that expands those areas, but I haven't played it.

All of the assets are original, mostly because this is not Valve's game, and the 14+ year gap between it and it's... inspiration. The music is fantastic, and the guy was nice enough to put it up for sale. I remember playing Oblivion back in the day, and I took some pre-released music from Black Mesa and put it into the music folder. It was good back then, and it seemed quite appropriate. Of course, that just goes to show me how long Black Mesa has been in production.

Speaking of being in production, it still is, as the final alien levels were not released back in September. I guess they wanted everyone to know that there was actually stuff going on, and it was worth waiting some more for. And you better enjoy it, because that's all the Half-Life there ever will be, since it is a dead series. There has been more time since the last installment than between the original and its sequel. Since then, there has been another popular game series about an alien invasion, that, well... you know.

You can't complain about this anymore. It's perfect!

Since you've made it this far, you might be interested in reading:

Black Mesa
Once upon a time, Valve released Half-Life: Source. Everyone expected it to have improved visuals, but were disappointed that it was merely a port. The water looked better, but since you're not looking at water for 99% of the time, that's not an improvement. Some industrious fans decided to make what they expected it to be, calling their project Black Mesa: Source. They set to remake Half-Life to a standard comparable to Half-Life 2. After practicing some mandatory Valve time, it appeared as a mod in 2013. A blogger wrote about it in 2014. Valve blessed the project, even granting permission to sell it on Steam. It released in 2015 with the same levels as the mod. They promised the ending Xen levels, which released in 2020. Said blogger bought this months ago, and it has been mocking him from his Steam library ever since.
Half-Life 2
I wasn't a properly initiated hard-core gamer back when Half-Life 2 came out. My only connection to the series was "oh, that weird box on the store shelf." After going to that one college, I realized that I needed a radical change in how I evaluated choices. I couldn't be a dumb kid that coasted through life on whatever the world gave me. I started by disregarding my freaky dreaming friend's advice that Half-Life 2 was a bad game, or at least so much that I avoided it, so I bought it and started playing.
Red vs. Blue
Soon after the Master Chief Collection came to Steam, I bought it. As I played through it, I made sure to document myself becoming a Halo fan. In so doing, I decided to dig into Halo machinima. I've encountered and even watched entire series of machinima before, but I never got into Red vs. Blue, the series that made machinima a big thing. Now that I've watched it all (or most of it), Red vs. Blue is the silliest series of anything that I've ever come across.
Puzzle Agent
Puzzle Agent is another one of those Telltale games that I've had in my Steam library for years. Well, it and its sequel, Puzzle Agent 2. They're so similar that the second one is functionally an expansion of the first, so I'm doing them both here.
Hector: Badge of Carnage
I've had this knocking around since I bought that Humble Bundle with all the Telltale games. Unlike most (all?) of the others, this one wasn't connected to any franchise I heard of. In retrospect, I should have expected this to be a nice film noir story, but it quickly became too absurd and comedic to qualify.
Papers, Please
Papers, Please is a bureaucrat simulator where you man a border checkpoint in a fictional totalitarian country during the late cold war. Gameplay mostly involves examining people's passports and other entry documents and calling 'gotcha' on them. Otherwise, you let them through if you can't find anything or you're lazy.